The globalization of today's supply chains (e.g., information and communication technologies, military systems, etc.) has created an emerging security threat that could degrade the integrity and availability of sensitive and critical government data, control systems, and infrastructures. Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and even government-off-the-self (GOTS) products are often designed, developed, and manufactured overseas. Counterfeit items, from individual chips to entire systems, have been found in commercial and government sectors. Supply chain attacks can be initiated at any point during the product or system lifecycle, and can have detrimental effects to mission success.
To date, there is a lack of analytics and decision support tools for analyzing supply chain security holistically, and for performing tradeoff analyses to determine how to invest in or deploy possible mitigation options for supply chain security such that a return on investment is optimized with respect to cost, efficiency, and security.